The need for business continuance and fast data recovery is acute and well known. Businesses may use data protection techniques to prevent data loss or to meet regulatory requirements. Data protection techniques may involve taking full backups of the data and thereafter taking incremental backups to track data changes. An incremental backup may comprise an object containing files or blocks that have changed since the last incremental backup. During recovery, the incremental backups may be applied to the full backup copy to restore the data to a point-in-time.
A significant amount of time and resources may be required, however, to perform a full backup since the backup is a complete copy of all the data stored on the primary storage device at a particular point-in-time. The delay may introduce expense to a data protection solution. Additionally, restore operations may not be efficient and/or effective.
Additionally, simultaneous full and incremental backups may result in deadlock, blocker issues, and/or confusions during restore. For example, it may be challenging to choose the correct full backup data and apply the correct incremental backup. During a backup, some incremental changes may be recorded prior to the completion of a full backup. Applying such incremental changes to the full backup in order to restore to a point-in-time may not yield the correct result.
There is a need, therefore, for an improved method or system that allows efficient simultaneous full and incremental backups on a storage system, and also effectively performs restore of the backup data.